What’s missing, though, is the central promise of a supergroup: the thrill of hearing established musicians in a truly different context. Minor Victories’ lineup may stem from different circles, but their approaches are so complementary that there’s rarely any tension or surprise.

The clear ambition of X-Communicate is to leave Welchez’s old persona behind and emerge, fresh and new, as something completely different, and by and large, that objective is achieved.

Mosey isn’t all gloom, though it boasts plenty of excellent bummer songs.

On Kidsticks, she no longer sounds like she has anything left to prove, which is precisely what's allowed her to make the riskiest album of her career. And she sounds like she's had the time of her life making it, too.

Simply put, the playing is more ambitious and varied on Goodness than on Home, Like NoPlace Is There, an album where the narrative drama manifests into some of the rawest anthems of unhinged youth and crippling self-loathing recorded this decade.

Enjoyable as it is, EP 4 does seem like smart risk management, a test run that confirms that whatever the group comes up with won’t be a Pixies-style disaster. As such, the rewards are modest.

The uneasy beats on Taste are part of what give that album its kick. Guitarist Geordie Gordon and drummer Adam Halferty also make both albums richer by providing dense textures and strong background vocals.

Should I Remain… is lighter, looser and more concise, in the same way that you refine your story once you’ve tried telling it a few times.

Earrings Off! is filled with these sorts of growing pains, ones that hopefully point to brighter pastures sometime soon for this promising band.

As a set of tracks for DJs to pick from, Rojus offers plenty of potential. As a front-to-back listening experience, it's almost paradise--but not quite the album that it wants to be.

Beyond the Bloodhounds isn’t a blues record per se, but in the grand tradition of the blues, it creates space to look your demons in the eye and acknowledge their foul existence without necessarily doing much about them.

It sounds quite unlike any of the electronic music being made in 2016, and is refreshingly unfashionable in that way.

Even if the results are uneven at times. Grande does not need to force any sort of spirit, she is full of it already. She just needs to find the Dangerous Woman within herself and let her break free.

His sparse yet driving music and the trenchant visual work accompanying are noteworthy elements of Allen’s four decades as an artist, but what stands out in revisiting Juarez now is the stunning poetry of the lines themselves. Allen’s words are a piquant kick throughout: raunchy, pithy, and richly redolent.

Kamikaze has a slightly slicker, glammier edge than its predecessors, as well as some unobtrusive strings on a couple of tracks, but the peppy backbeats, gang-shouted choruses, and fist-pumping enthusiasm remain.

Ullages opens up a greater sense of space for Eagulls to soar, but can feel more distant and isolating as a result.

The result is an album that creates its own world, one it feels like you could reach out and brush with your fingers.

Ashcroft always fares best when he sounds like he’s addressing another person in an intimate exchange rather than megaphoning the entire human race, and there are moments on These People where he reconnects with the steely-eyed conviction and restlessness that fueled his best songs.

As Nadler exorcises her own demons, she brings you along with her, making you feel a little less anxious about your own despair. She sees poetry in the mundane, elegance in the gloom.

The final product, then, feels adrift: just off the coast of delivering a discrete emotional impact, offering a sporadic, self-reflexive charm for fans who smile at Dylan’s every left turn, whether in spite of themselves or on principle.

Crime Cutz's weakness lies in its lack of diversity--you spend a lot of the record hoping for something to take them even further over the edge, but they continue to pull back until the very end.

Judged on its own merits, A New Wave of Violence is a fine hardcore record, one that manages to balance chaotic intensity with a workmanlike precision that few punk bands can muster.

Like the rest of his comedy oeuvre, Heidecker pulls no punches. In Glendale arrives as a fully formed beast, equal parts parody and confession of our universal lameness.

More important than this deft lyrical touch, though, is his ability to display it within a musically engaging song. Unlike some indie-rock songwriters, Toledo's lyrics don't just sit on the page. The choruses don't arrive at the expected moments or follow traditional shapes, but they hit hard nonetheless.

Cut and Paste is hooky and appealing; with a gear change, he could easily move into a realm where people are actually paying attention. For now, he's a very sweet stream in a cultural backwater.

The set ranges eclectically in both style and level of inventiveness. Most anyone with any kind of appreciation for the Grateful Dead will find probably at least an hour or three of music to dig and really groove with; Dead freaks might also find a good deal to snicker at.

The mindset of Skip a Sinking Stone is best entered with the intent of total immersion and allotting a similar amount of Mutual Benefit music to more conventional song structures and interludes can feel like a vision quest stopped too frequently for bathroom breaks.

Beneath all of this nihilism is some real skilled songwriting that includes complex rhyme schemes, swaggering rhythms, and stunning harmonies.

It’s familiar but new; varied but consistent; full of ambience but sturdy.

Oh No is a gorgeous and deadly pop music manifesto that proves yet again the sad girls are not vulnerable and silent subjects.

Jameszoo's work is strongest when he tones down the overt jazz and instead parses the genre for specific sounds and ideas to embellish his electronic experimentations.

Coloring Book is one of the strongest rap albums released this year, and is destined to be on year-end lists aplenty. It's a more rewarding listen than Drake's recently released VIEWS; it's nearly as adventurous as The Life of Pablo.

The line separating Saturday night and Sunday morning is no thicker than a second hand; Yoyogi Park invites you to clear out a space inside that sliver of time, and to luxuriate in it.

With Nattesferd Kvelertak exploit an opportunity to create a sense of mystery. More importantly, they back it up with a group of songs that's virtually filler-free and loses little steam towards the end.

Arbor Labor Union have taken a respectable leap toward realizing the throbbing cosmic Americana that clearly rings in their souls.

Konnichiwa is as nakedly vulnerable Skepta has ever been, and it represents a tantalizingly wide-open door for grime. It’ll be our job as listeners to step through and discover what we’ve been missing.

Cohen will never be able to escape the context surrounding Bloom Forever, but he refuses to let himself be defined by tragedy. His bold, distinctive debut album stands a million miles from the celebrity circus, and will endure far longer than mawkish titillation.

While the shift towards tempered indie rock often robs Holy Ghost of the instant gratification of early MoBo, there isn’t a single clunker lyric that was wedged in for the sake of cleverness.

It makes for a fascinating listen, one filled with catharsis and inspiration. Rae doesn’t directly mention her past struggles, but her light permeates this record, leaving a shining example of strength and perseverance.

The result is a casual, charmingly low-key set of kitchen-table blues, slow-dance serenades, and unplugged power pop.

Deeply atmospheric and richly impressionistic, Under the Sun is an easy album to disappear into.

His record’s name is meant to suggest a certain sense of incompleteness, but it’s one of the most well-edited, coherent debuts to emerge in recent memory.

One senses a massively missed opportunity, a chance for exploration blown by Jarre's insatiable need to make everything bigger, more impressive.

She does so much work on Get Gone that you wind up hoping she follows through on her promise.

On their new album Bottomless Pit, they stitch together one of their most cohesive grotesques ever, renewing their focus on songcraft, rather than chicanery.

The result is a revelatory experience that requires no legible revelations: vocals of ecstatic defiance matched to music seemingly composed of pure magnitude; melancholic synths, sparse guitars, and bombastic strings and drums. The overall feeling is of an all-hands, against-the-odds triumph against staggering forces.

It’s more of a slow burn and a slight step backward from Liquid Spirit’s dynamic nature. The results are nice, but with too few standouts, Alley breezes by.

Throughout the album, Yorke’s everyday enlightenment is backed by music of expanse and abandon. The guitars sound like pianos, the pianos sound like guitars, and the mixes breathe with pastoral calm.

Unlike a truly original record like Ether Teeth, For Good is hardly groundbreaking: it’s an album of warped, melancholic indie-pop that slots in nicely next to acts like Sparklehorse, the Eels, and Radiohead. That’s hardly a bad thing, even if Fog’s current incarnation is a far cry from its more experimental beginnings.

The record is fluid, but front-loaded.

Clocking in at 76 minutes, The Colour in Anything is Blake’s wonderfully messy dive into maximalism.

It still speaks for Cluster’s prescience, to render the mechanistic noise of early electronic devices and warm them up in such a manner so as to reveal that no matter the new technology, such components are ultimately human after all.

All in all, the sparks are overshadowed by poor choices and general lack of direction.

Will may at first seem small, private, and modestly appointed--just a room with a piano, a synthesizer, and a looping pedal--but once you settle in, it feels as vast as the universe in there.

Whether autobiographical or artistic, As If Apart is a powerful, exquisitely realized journey, the sort of bummer that sounds strongest in that alien hour between when you’re supposed to fall asleep and when you should be jerking awake.

The production and Wolf’s vocals are lush and subdued to where the story feels like one long dream sequence. Its best moments come when Geti yanks you violently into a scene.

Not only does the record’s scrappy, lived-in ambiance reflect the DIY necessities of that scene--it creates an intimate, densely packed time-capsule, in which strange aromas have mingled until even the minor curios are a source of wonder.

On Trágame Tierra, Bates is both audacious and original, two qualities that are hard to fault. But in the absence of focus, listening to Trágame Tierra can feel like looking for dinner in a candy store: there's a lot of brightly-colored packaging to take in but not much you can really sink your teeth into.

On Paradise, Barber-Way steps outside of her own body and the assaults it sustains, and creates a searing portrait of what it can look like to love without fear, even when that love doesn't resemble the fantasy we've been sold.

Overall, White Hot Moon is likely to please existing fans of Pity Sex--its 12 tracks largely find the band continuing to leverage what worked on Feast of Love. That said, White Hot Moon isn’t quite as catchy as that record.

The message is encoded into every note: If Anohni's music can manifest into something new, then perhaps we can. There is risk involved with moving from a timeless sound towards one that attempts to capture a moment, but without risk art is worthless.

Despite the omission of obvious classics like “Warm Leatherette” or Fad Gadget’s “Ricky’s Hand” (presumably because the Mute label archive was off-limits to the compiler) Close To the Noise Floor provides a fascinating overview of the formative years of British home-studio electronica: groups who were precursors in spirit, if not direct lineage, to the techno and IDM artists of the ’90s. Still, with the cult for “minimal wave” now a decade old, it almost feels like another task has become urgent: the rediscovery of the groups that did the groundwork for the outfits on Disc 3 of Noise Floor.

Boeckner's melodies are precise and the choruses show moments of bright clarity cutting through the foggy verses: not unlike fleeing a bleak reality to find asylum in a dream. He hasn't sounded this committed and angry since leading Atlas Strategic a decade and a half ago.

Nonagon Infinity is overstuffed with so many stomach-tossing thrills that you’ll actually be jonesing to ride the roller-coaster all over again.

He is as detail-oriented with his beats as he is with his raps, providing the right mood at every occasion. Some of them are busy and swarming, while others are pleasantly simple.

Where Little Red saw Katy throwing herself into the occasional ballad, Honey is reduced to a pure set of dance music; within these aesthetic limits, though, it may be her most varied record stylistically.

The 19 tracks that make up this confectioner's array sit in neatly ordered rows, most of them sweet, light, and pleasant, with novel ingredients often cropping in the middle or even near the end of tracks.

Spanning an obnoxious 82 minutes, the record goes through several musical and thematic phases, but the overall atmosphere is bitter, petty, worn-down. It confuses loyalty and stagnation, wallowing in a sound that is starting to show its limits.

Sometimes the hooks on Genesis get wonky, there are portions of the record that feel unfinished (like the second half of "Wanderer"), and every now and then Domo will sneak in a groaner. But for the most part, Genesis is a revelation.

Methyl Ethel’s debut full-length, Oh Inhuman Spectacle, is reflective of the project’s humble, hermetic beginnings, with Webb handling all the production and instrumentation.

If the first half of the album has a lethargic sense that record never quite shakes, the last two tracks suggest there may be more for the group to explore in the future.

Craft’s outsized personality is matched by less flashy, more fundamental skills: vivid, immersive storytelling and sharply focused, fat-free songs that have the lived-in feel of 40-year-old FM-radio favorites.

As much as the record flirts with reinvention—personal, political, musical--its modest ambition sounds exactly like complacency.

True to that nighttime scene-setter, Nocturnal Koreans ranks among Wire’s most musically relaxed releases, with Newman mostly singing in calm, sometimes hushed tones. But it’s only relaxed in the sense that a sleepless night in your bedroom is relaxed.

Dälek took hip-hop into new stylistic realms before. This time, although Brooks and company may not have specifically intended as much, on Asphalt for Eden, hip hop ascends into the noosphere.

This group is wise and capable enough to eschew nearly every shortcut of today's personality-first music culture and dial into the silence between the noise. It's what confidence sounds like.

A little more editing and pacing might have made the whole album like this, but given enough time, Triangle has moments of clarity to be found.

The Ship is a great, unexpected record.

Skifflin', an enjoyably low-stakes release, feels less like McCombs’ next frontier in tackling the Great American Folk Album than a leisurely sojourn.

They always sound nostalgic, but the immediacy of Dahlström's vocals yanks all the warm, communal feelings associated with that sound into a present where they're in short supply.

Plants and Animals have created something beautiful, even if it's not wholly original.

On its face a seemingly modest project, At the Dam bursts with ambition and ideas, offering a meditation on the ever-evolving relationship Lattimore has to her instrument and the spaces she shares it with.

Production-value is high, with Ferg enlisting top-tier beatmakers like the aforementioned DJ Khalil but also No I.D., DJ Mustard, and even Skrillex. But the beats take a backseat to the lyrics. The overall sound remains intact, but he’s even more invested in what he’s saying.

Lemonade is a stunning album, one that sees her exploring sounds she never has before. It also voices a rarely seen concept, that of the album-length ode to infidelity. Even stranger, it doesn’t double as an album-length ode to breaking up.

You get the feeling as you listen to the entirety of Lost Themes II that someone let their finger linger far too long on the butter button at the movie theater concession stand.

There’s plenty of low and high end, but none of the gray in-between. It makes for an album that sounds more like backing tracks missing the singer and the song to complete them. If anything, Too Many Voices sounds like it has too few.

In evoking Lynch and Badalamenti, Xiu Xiu have made one of their most beautiful and listenable albums, one that highlights everything the band does well while shaving down the rough edges that often turn away foes and friends alike.

The album ends strong, from "America" to closer "Off," but much like most of Royce’s solo catalog, there aren't many songs on Layers that really reward replaying or close listening.

It's an impressive influx of new talent, but you would be hard-pressed to hear it for most of the album.

Sonics aside, what truly distinguishes this recent iteration of Sorority Noise is Boucher's newfound sense of responsibility.

Please Be Honest certainly has its charms. But for the first time in Pollard’s career, Guided by Voices isn’t the main event--which, for the band’s legions of fans, is surely a loss.

Outer Heaven's heightened ambitions are best measured in terms of density rather than sprawl: the most bracing songs here pack in more radiant guitar textures, a greater lyrical depth, and sharper hooks without sacrificing Greys' innate moshability and punk-schooled economy.

The Diary is notable for presenting an official release to his intended debut. And, just like any diamond unearthed after many years, The Diary is flawed, but still precious.

If there’s a weakness with Blind Spot it might simply be its brevity, or perhaps the marked absence of the kind of swaggering sonic guitar bombast the band unleashed in old songs like “Sweetness and Light” or “Superblast!.” Regardless, Blind Spot feels like an assured--albeit somewhat tentative—way for the band to dip their toes back in the water

A Sailor's Guide to Earth is such a rearrangement of Simpson's sonic universe that any previous categorization now seems out of date.

It’s a short album—six songs, 33 minutes--but a substantial one, a deeply personal work that takes us inside the mind of Animal Collective’s most mysterious member, while restoring some of the patience and mystique that’s been sucked out of that band’s recent, more spasmodic work.

While not a record of cast-iron slam dunks, Welcome the Worms possesses enough raw power to cast Bleached in a completely different light, and one that is considerably more sustainable than their debut.

Instead of a love letter to consuming blazes, Hoop's and Beam's collection appeals to our individual internal pilot lights: those softly smoldering flames that illuminate moments of beauty in ourselves, in each other, and beyond.